Joni Mitchell is one of the few songwriters fearless enough to admit that, for a while, she thought Bob Dylan was a fraud. Not just overrated, but literally “putting me on.” Then life caught up with Dylan’s songs, and everything changed.
If you have ever rolled your eyes at some revered songwriter, only to wake up years later and suddenly “get it,” you are walking the same road Mitchell described when she called herself a late Dylan fan. Her journey from suspicion to influence is a masterclass in how age, experience and context can unlock music that once sounded like pretentious nonsense.
“I Was Almost Anti-Dylan”: Joni’s Late Conversion
In a 1968 Broadside interview, Mitchell cheerfully outed herself as “a late Dylan fan.” As a young folk singer she was “almost anti-Dylan,” loudly telling people she thought he was putting her on and making “a lot of enemies” in the process. She confessed that she simply could not accept him at first, a rare moment of candor in a scene that already treated Dylan like a secular saint.
Mitchell’s problem, as she later explained in a 1977 ZigZag conversation, was not that Dylan was shallow but that she felt shut out of his world. The imagery and politics felt remote, and she interpreted his ambiguity as dishonesty rather than distance. In her words, she used to be outspoken, then learned to stay noncommittal “until I really figure out what they are saying.”
That self critique is brutal: she admits that her early rejection of Dylan says more about her own limitations than about his work. By the late 1960s she could already feel the ground shifting, telling Broadside that “this late in the game, I think I’m Dylan influenced” and hinting that the very lines she once distrusted were starting to land differently.
No Shared Experience, No Entry
The key phrase in Mitchell’s late fan confession is deceptively simple: “I shared no experience with Dylan at that time.” She thought the lines she could not decode were just evasive poetry games, “ambiguous and not written honestly,” until she lived through her own wars, breakups, tours and compromises. Only then did she realize those were precisely the parts she had “no idea of at the time.”
In other words, Dylan had not changed, but her life had. This is a nasty little truth that many listeners resist: some songs are not for who you are yet. A 20 year old might hear tangled surrealism; a 50 year old hears a field report from the trenches of adulthood. Mitchell’s honesty cuts both ways, exposing how often we mistake our lack of experience for a songwriter’s lack of sincerity.
The Shakespeare Epiphany: When Performance Cracks the Code
To explain her Dylan turnaround, Mitchell reached for an even bigger ghost: Shakespeare. She admitted she used to think Shakespeare was “wordy and weird” until she saw a performance at Stratford where an actor delivered the lines as if they were modern speech. The super drama vanished, the language flowed like contemporary English, and suddenly the plays made sense, just as she recounted in that Broadside piece.
Mitchell’s point is viciously direct: sometimes it is not the text that is opaque, it is the delivery and your own readiness. Dylan’s dense mid 60s imagery can sound like word salad if you have never staggered through a night like the ones he documents. After enough life, she said, “the things that I thought were just words for word’s sake make sense to me” and every line lights up with some personal meaning, even if it is not the one Dylan had in mind.
From Distrust to Influence: “Cactus Tree” in Dylan’s Shadow
Mitchell did not just learn to tolerate Dylan; she eventually admitted that he seeped into her own writing. In that same 1968 interview she singled out “Cactus Tree,” the closing track of her debut album, as consciously Dylan influenced in both melody and style. She described lengthening her “a” vowels and keeping the melody almost monotone after watching the Dylan documentary Dont Look Back, which left a “big impression” on her sense of phrasing.
Far Out Magazine later highlighted how striking this influence is for a songwriter often furious at being compared to Dylan, noting that Mitchell even calls herself Dylan influenced “late in the game.” The piece connects her late conversion directly to “Cactus Tree,” with its long, tumbling lines and emotional distance, a structure that owes more to Dylan’s narrative sprawl than to the tidy folk ballads she started out singing.
From Late Fan to Harsh Critic: The Plagiarist Rant
Fast forward a few decades and the tone curdles. In a notorious 2010 interview originally published in the Los Angeles Times, Mitchell went for Dylan’s throat: “Bob is not authentic at all. He’s a plagiarist, and his name and voice are fake. Everything about Bob is a deception. We are like night and day, he and I.” The Guardian’s summary of the exchange notes that she delivered the tirade unprompted once his name came up.
When the backlash came, she mostly doubled down. In a 2013 CBC conversation, recounted by Far Out, she blasted the interviewer as an “asshole” and a “moron” who took her words out of context, yet still insisted Dylan was “not very gifted” musically, had “borrowed his voice from old hillbillies,” was not a great guitar player and had “invented a character to deliver his songs” like a mask she almost envied.
The Vintage News has mapped this feud as a decades long pattern of wary respect, petty slights and sharp public comments, from Dylan allegedly dozing off at a Court and Spark listening party to later plagiarism spats. The article calls Mitchell the “yang to Bob Dylan’s yin” and notes that while she later claimed she was misquoted on calling him “not authentic,” she never really walked back the charge of plagiarism.
Mask vs Diary: How Joni Frames the Difference
| Topic | Joni on Joni | Joni on Dylan |
|---|---|---|
| Persona | Writes as herself, using real life in almost raw form. | Has “invented a character” to sing through, a deliberate mask. |
| Voice | Unvarnished, sometimes fragile, but hers alone. | “Borrowed from old hillbillies,” more collage than confession. |
| Guitar | Idiosyncratic tunings, harmonic complexity, intimate dynamics. | Functional folk strumming, satisfying but not virtuoso in her view. |
| Lyrics | Personal, specific, often painfully direct. | Abstract, borrowing from older texts, delivered by a constructed persona. |
Whether you agree with her or not, this framework is brutally clear. For Mitchell, authenticity is less about never borrowing and more about how nakedly the work exposes the writer’s own life. She hears Dylan as a brilliant playwright hiding behind a costume, and herself as the actor who walks onstage without one.
Why Older Ears Finally Hear Dylan
Mitchell’s late fan story sneaks up on anyone who has listened to the same record at 18 and 58 and been shocked at how much darker it suddenly sounds. A divorce, a war, a health scare, a dead friend: each new wound is another decoder ring for lines that once seemed like empty surrealism. Age does not just bring patience; it supplies the missing experiences that songs like Dylan’s assume.
It is tempting to pretend that all great art is instantly graspable by the pure of heart. Mitchell’s arc says the opposite. A lot of the canon is written by people who were already old in the head, even when they were young in years. Sometimes you have to live enough to be able to hear what they were trying to tell you.
- You may hate a writer because they genuinely are shallow.
- Or you may hate them because they are writing from rooms you have not entered yet.
- The trick is knowing which is which, and that takes time.
Listening Like Joni: How To Grow Into Difficult Artists
If you want to steal something useful from Mitchell’s journey, start here: she did not force herself to like Dylan out of peer pressure. She waited, kept living, and kept his records around long enough to be surprised by them. That patience is an underrated listening skill.
- Revisit what you once dismissed. Put on an album you “didn’t get” every five or ten years. You might be shocked which lines finally land.
- Change the setting. Mitchell’s Shakespeare revelation only happened in the theater; your Dylan moment might need headphones, night driving or a live show, not a tinny kitchen radio.
- Listen line by line, not myth by myth. Drop the legend of Dylan or Mitchell and ask, “Does this verse describe anything I have actually lived?”
- Accept that influence can follow rejection. Mitchell went from anti fan to admitting a song like “Cactus Tree” bore Dylan’s melodic fingerprints. Influence is often the ghost of arguments you once had with someone’s work.
- Let songs age with you. Some lyrics are kids; some are old men. The old men may only start talking to you when you are limping a little yourself.
Guitars, Intimacy and the Sound of Truth
There is one more layer here that a site like this cannot ignore: the instrument itself. Mitchell and Dylan did their most pivotal work on acoustic guitars, a tool that punishes singers who have nothing real to say. A thin lyric over a giant arena mix can hide; a thin lyric over a lone dreadnought cannot.
As Know Your Instrument’s guide to acoustic shapes points out, smaller parlour guitars are often favored by folk singer songwriters for their intimate, voice friendly sound, while big dreadnoughts and jumbos throw out a broad, room filling roar. Both Mitchell and Dylan exploited that intimacy: close mics, dry acoustics, every consonant and breath exposed. When Mitchell accuses Dylan of hiding behind a character, she is leveling that charge in the most unforgiving sonic environment possible.
So Who Was Right about Dylan?
The boring answer is that both Joni Mitchells were right. The younger one was honest enough to say “this does not speak to my life,” and the older one was honest enough to admit “now it does, and it has even bent my own writing.” The later, furious Joni, mocking his musicianship and calling him a plagiarist, was also being honest about how fiercely she guards her idea of authenticity.
What makes her late Dylan fan confession so powerful is not that she ended up worshipping him. It is that she shows how volatile real listening is. You are allowed to change your mind about the giants, even more than once. In fact, if you never do, it probably means the music stopped challenging you a long time ago.
